How Mayfair is celebrating Bastille Day, with £22 Champagne cocktails and an £85 Provençal feast

There are few places outside France where Bastille Day can be celebrated quite as extravagantly as Mayfair. This July, one of London's newest French restaurants is marking the occasion with a week of Provençal cooking, seasonal seafood and Champagne cocktails, bringing a distinctly Gallic interpretation of France's national day to Hanover Square.

Mazarine, the Michelin Guide-recommended seafood restaurant that opened in December 2025, will serve a limited-edition Bastille Day menu from July 13 to 19, created by its executive chef, Thierry Laborde. At its centre is Le Grand Aïoli, the great communal Provençal dish traditionally built around fish, vegetables and generous quantities of garlic mayonnaise.

Priced at £85 and intended for sharing, Mazarine's version brings together langoustine, salted cod, eggs, clams, carrots, fennel, celery, radish and wakame alongside house-made aïoli. It is the sort of dish that makes little concession to the modern preference for solitary plates and carefully divided portions. Grand Aïoli belongs instead to the older Mediterranean tradition of gathering people around a table and giving them something substantial to share.

The meal begins more delicately, with sliced yellowtail served with Occitanie cherries and lemon vinaigrette for £23, bringing together French seasonal produce and the seafood around which Mazarine has built much of its identity. Dessert is similarly classical: a £25 strawberry millefeuille of crisp pastry, Chantilly cream and seasonal fruit.

Yet Bastille Day without Champagne would be a rather austere affair, and Mazarine is also offering four interpretations of the French 75, the cocktail traditionally made with gin, lemon, sugar and Champagne and named after the French 75mm field gun used during the First World War.

The classic version combines Tanqueray gin with lemon juice, sugar syrup and Moët & Chandon Impérial Brut. More adventurous variations include the Maxwell 75, made with cucumber-infused Hendrick's gin, cucumber and ginger; the Old Cuban 75, which substitutes rum for gin and adds mint and lime; and the Piscine 76, made with kaffir leaf-infused Belvedere vodka. Each costs £22.

Since opening on Hanover Square, Mazarine has sought to distinguish itself through a combination of classical French technique and a particular emphasis on seafood, taking inspiration from the country's coastal regions rather than treating French cuisine solely as a parade of butter, cream and heavy sauces.

Its Bastille Day menu also arrives at a time when London's long relationship with French cooking appears in remarkably good health. Culinary fashions may come and go, but the French restaurant has proved unusually resilient, surviving nouvelle cuisine, molecular gastronomy and the rise of social media dining. The appeal of a properly made sauce, fresh seafood and a good bottle of Champagne has evidently not disappeared.

For Londoners, July 14 has never required much knowledge of the storming of the Bastille or the finer points of the French Revolution to provide an excuse for dinner. Mazarine is extending that excuse to an entire week, with a menu that draws on something rather more enduring than revolutionary politics: France's extraordinary ability to turn eating and drinking into a national art form.